Global computer networks, such as the Internet, enable information to be distributed to a wide range of people at locations around the world. One of the advantages of the Internet is that the communication protocols used are non-proprietary, thus enabling end users to access and use the Internet without the need for customized hardware or software. Many different industries use computer networks as a way to provide their customers with quick access to vast amounts of data. In these businesses, the speed at which both secure and non-secure data is provided to remote users is of utmost importance and is often an area of distinctiveness for these businesses. One common technique to allow businesses to more quickly distribute data to users involves the use of proxy servers that reside closer on the network to the users requesting the data. By using a proxy server to cache the response to a user's first data request, subsequent identical data requests from the same user can be handled by the proxy server without the need to query a data server to retrieve the same information again.
However, the user of proxy servers for providing data to users may be unsuitable when data providers need robust control of access to the data. For example, financial data providers are required to comply with laws and regulations governing the distribution of financial data. Furthermore, financial information is quite valuable and financial data providers must have a means of preventing access from unauthorized and/or non-paying customers. Therefore, financial data providers, as well as data providers in other industries, may generate entitled data which is restricted to a subset of users. In many current systems, entitled data is requested from a data source and the data in transit is marked as non-cacheable to prevent unauthorized users from accessing cached data. For example, after a user requests and receives entitled data from a secure data provider, that user's permissions to access the secure data may be subsequently revoked. The non-cacheable data will not be cached at a proxy server, and subsequent data requests for the same data will need to be retrieved again from the data server.
However, in larger client-server systems providing entitled data to users, server capacity is more or less linearly related to the number of users on the system. Accordingly, for every request generated by a user or the addition of new user, the capacity of the servers required to generate and send the entitled data increases. The servers can only handle a fixed number of requests per time, so as the number of requests grow, the number of servers must increase, which greatly increases the expense for financial firms to generate and send entitled data. Accordingly, a need exists for additional methods and systems to provide access to entitled data.